Today's speaker, as always, pleasure to introduce our country because he's part of the fabric of the changing
national program is what we have guys as research associate on the program.
Served as a political military officer in the U.S. to five conflicts, including places like El Salvador,
Nepal and Golden Salsa served in Brazil and Papua New Guinea, where I was most my support.
And we're going to have a stay in regional commander, say in Kandahar in Afghanistan, where he was the director of the Initiatives Group.
He's also worked in Washington, D.C., which was much insurgency going on, though.
I could be wrong about that. That's a real danger post. Absolutely.
And he's also taught as professor of strategy and policy at the US Naval War College and has
been a visiting scholar and now the Centre for Strategic Studies at Johns Hopkins University,
which is fantastic. These publications have included, I don't know, the dates to be so I apologise said when you did them.
But some crossroads of intervention, insurgency and counterinsurgency lessons from Central America and the United States.
The politics of conflict in the volatile world and our which is about to come out, I think is about to come out in the journal stories.
That is not out yet is it is called Bureaucracy does its thing in Afghanistan.
This team has had the pleasure of to read to assist with it.
His current doctoral dissertation is called The Reagan Doctrine Wars in Central America and go to Afghanistan.
So there are few people better qualified to give that civil military perspective of what's going to happen if someone comes to talk.
Thank you very much indeed for agreeing to speak. Thank you, Robert.
And I just want to for colleagues who know me that the lovely red coat belongs to my wife who's come from Rome.
And I'll just point out that she has actually experienced more wars quantitatively
than than I have in her in her career with the UN and the International Red Cross.
Please forgive the use of we. It's been pointed out to me that I that I use we what I mean is not the royal academic way,
but it's 30 years of of serving as in the US government and it's really hard to refer to something you've been belong to for so long as that.
So that's, that's what I'm talking about sometimes, including the coalition partners.
The story that I'm going to tell and I'll get to it at the end.
The back half of the talk is about how we cracked the code in southern Afghanistan during 2010 and 11.
And I will explain that. But first, I'm going to give some context, too,
to the Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan and enumerate what I see is
some fundamental strategic problems with with that from the very beginning.
I'll also give a net assessment of the of the antagonists in the war there.
Talk about the nature of the war. And really,
the central theme that you're going to see woven all through it is why political and
military action integrated and unified is essential for success in conflicts like this.
I'm. The Keep your ears open.
They're out there in no particular order are sort of what I come up with as eight propositions
of that lead to to an idea that I'm sort of working on now called strategic sufficiency.
And basically what it boils down to is what do you have to do to get the job done?
So it's not a legal formal definition like we heard last last week from you need to deal that there will be eight of those.
The story is not particularly great when you're talking about Afghanistan,
nor is it the first time that the United States has has experienced most of the problems that have come up.
We're not very good at protracted interventions. But here's what I'm not saying.
Afghanistan is not the graveyard of empires. That's a myth.
It is the graveyard of the ambitions of empires. That's for sure.
It's not I'm not talking about the nature of Afghanistan or Afghans either.
Really, what I'm talking about is, is us. And by us I mean the US and the coalition partners.
I'm not saying that Afghanistan is a complete failure, that the basic goals, you know,
as President Obama likes to say, you know, choose your deeds, degrade, dismantle, disrupt, defeat Al Qaida.
Those are those have fundamentally been achieved or that there hasn't been enormous and significant progress in Afghanistan.
So but bottom line, if you're looking for a contemporary prognosis.
Yes. Well, we're probably going to end up muddling through.
It's not going to it's not going to look like a defeat.
But the cost. The duration were excessive, unnecessary and unjustified.
And we should have done better. And we should have known what to do from the beginning.
Let me start with a couple of parallels.
There have been other situations in which the United States with associated allies has gotten involved in wars that were set.
The conditions for those wars were set by unsatisfactory termination of the prior wars.
It's fairly common strategic situation in which the wars began with a surprise
attack that resulted in national mobilisation and significant military commitment.
And that the the shock of surprise attack reversed deep, deep resistance to becoming involved militarily.
And of course, I'm talking about World War Two. Looking at it from another player, from another position.
It's not the first war in which we were compelled.
We felt ourselves compelled to play to our strengths, which were to out resource and out fight on the ground, out fight our identified adversary.
And then when when we realised that we had not figured out how to defeat an insurgency, we looked for negotiations and thought an exit.
And that, of course, the precedent for that, the big one is Vietnam.
Now that we've gone into a fairly consolidated phase of drawdown in Afghanistan, we're also repeating something that happened after Vietnam,
which was a complete withdrawal, a complete resistance to intervention whatsoever.
And that and that reluctance is causing is causing what I think of as numerous consequences that are happening right now.
So if you go back to the to the to supporting the Mujahideen for the Soviets to fight the Soviets in the 1980s, we turned our back.
We turned a blind eye to Pakistan's acquisition of nuclear weapons immediately after not only after the Soviets pulled out,
not only did we abandon the Taliban, which that led down, did we abandon the Mujahideen,
which led the track to the to the Mujahadeen getting to power?
And ultimately down to 911, we also reversed our position to Pakistan, slapped nuclear sanctions on them.
And it was at that point that they began to proliferate in a serious way, including their one of their primary proliferation partners was Iran.
Here we are today. Other consequences as a result of Iraq and Afghanistan.
In this phase, I believe that the the perceived failure of U.S. leadership and liberal democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Have. Encouraged Islamic extremism and have contributed materially,
although very difficult to put your finger tangibly on how that works have contributed to the instability of the Arab Spring.
Add to that now our unwillingness to commit to have a standoff approach to conflicts that do erupt and we are definitely in a down cycle.
That's why this stuff matters. All right.
Now turning to Afghanistan. The Afghan what I call the Afghanistan elephant syndrome, you know, destroy the blind man and the elephant.
I don't think I've ever met a commander or an ambassador, anybody in senior leadership position that hadn't said,
well, if they'd only done it my way when I was in charge and end it up and you get a lot of good stuff.
But the idea is that Afghanistan would have come out right during my time.
So this is my piece of the Afghan elephant.
And if there's one fundamental difference, that difference, I'd like to point to that,
that when I get to the story about it's about what we did in the South.
The difference was, is that we listened to the Afghans and we tried to do what they said we should be doing rather than focusing on us,
telling them what to do. Problems.
The first big one is we kept changing.
Just between 2009 and today, we went from sort of a half hearted, heavy handed semi counterinsurgency effort to reassessing.
Reassessing, not a bad thing, but boom, bitcoin.
Comprehensive counterinsurgency. Fully resourced, or at least in principle, fully resourced.
An open ended. It was going to go on to oops again.
Now we're in drawdown and handing over to the Afghans. And.
Oh, by the way. Oops.
I never get over this. Whatever we were doing at the moment was always good for the Afghans.
And they just had to get on with what it was we wanted them to do.
And that's where all this a lot of the friction came out.
From their perspective, though, it's been over a generation of war, of anarchy, of extremism, and that's lasted since the communist coup in 1978.
Soviets invaded in 79. So it's pretty much unbroken, but it's really not about those combative Afghans.
Yes, they are warlike people. And if you want to learn more, read Rob's book, The Afghan Way of War.
It's all it's all made out there in great detail and with a lot of insight.
But a critical part of this is it's not those Afghans, it's Afghans at the intersection of the the world outside.
Afghanistan has always been an intersection of empires for millennia.
You've got your Mongols. You've got your moguls.
You've got your Persians. You've got your Greeks. You've got the British.
You've got your Soviets. Now you've got us. So what we do and what we don't do has a fundamental impact on what happens there.
To just sort of just to capture a more historical perspective on what Afghan looks like, what what the situation feels like.
I met a quote, my favourite quote from Two Cities can't get through a talk like this without going through Clausewitz for you.
So the sufferings which the revolution entailed were many and terrible,
such as always occurred and always will occur as long as human nature remains the same.
In peace and prosperity. States and individuals have better sentiments because they are not confronted with imperious necessities.
But war takes away the easy supply of daily ones and proves a rough master that reduces most men's characters to the levels of their fortunes.
And I think that that sort of if you you know, the whole time I was in Afghanistan,
I held that as my mantra in dealing with these in dealing with these situations.
So we started out okay in 2000, one overthrow boom.
Set up a government with a bond conference and then the United States basically turned its back, got real small.
We were mopping up, as Donald Rumsfeld called it. This was sort of the roots of counterterrorist action, you know,
running around with in trucks at night, guys with guns, doing stuff that's still going on.
And and we sure as heck weren't going to do that wimpy nation building stuff.
So that's a problem. The.
The core of it is that in focusing on military action, we over militarised.
Even though everybody says, oh, counterinsurgency, 80% political, 20% military.
Same thing has happened in Vietnam. The it was the military that pretty much ran the show has continued to run the show,
not least because only civilians had civilians who simply did not have the capacity or the orientation to do it.
So my first proposition, remember, accelerate.
First proposition is.
Absolute number one requirement is to understand the nature of the war that you're involved in and conceive of your aims accordingly.
Without trying to change it into something. It's not right out of Clausewitz.
We never did get that right. Never did get the strategy, the fundamental strategy, the policy of Afghanistan.
Right. And. Part of that becomes is because we were focusing on the negative aims of defeating the al Qaeda and then defeating the Taliban.
Our positive aims were these wildly ambitious transforming Afghanistan into a democracy
in a developed country and all that not going to happen was never going to happen.
Anybody sitting from the outside looking objectively would see that that was a bridge too far on.
Which which leads me to the question of, well, what was what was a realistic, positive aim?
I think it can be produced to build a stable order. That was what our aim should have been.
Something at some much more minimal level. Second proposition.
Strategic sufficiency requires balancing both positive and negative aims.
That leads to my third proposition, which is every war must end.
All right. Afghanistan since 1978 has been at war in one way or other.
But everyone needs to end. And the way it ends is the most important thing about a war.
How it ends is the most important thing. So Afghans are in a war that has yet to end.
Our involvement in this war is for the second time.
And from their perspective and I'm speaking I'm not speaking for every individual Afghan and all that, but in general.
Right. For them, this golden time, as I've heard them call it many times, is coming to an end.
And their fear, their deepest fear is that our drawdown is going to lead to abandonment,
and that's going to lead to a situation that an Islam is called fitna, which means disorder.
And that is the thing that they fear the most, a return to disorder.
There is a core strategic dynamic. About Afghanistan, about how wars actually end there.
I mean, it's not military defeat. That's not the model. And I'm going to quote from Tom Barfield.
Some of you may know his book, Afghanistan A Cultural and Political History,
which is if somebody asked me, what's the one thing to read about Afghanistan, that's it.
Barfield says the way a war ends. Being labelled a winner or loser is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
What brings about such shifts is a change in the political calculations of decision makers in each region of Afghanistan.
Such appraisals are based on empirical evidence about whether a defender can successfully maintain the core foundation of his power base.
That's a war zone in Afghanistan. So question to ponder.
Who decides when a war is over? The winner or the loser?
And my people say winner. You bet. And many people say loser.
Okay. All right. So now reflect.
When President Obama says war is winding down.
What is he saying? Not saying the war is coming to an end, that we have successfully terminated this war.
All right. You saying we're getting out? So.
And the point is that an exit strategy.
You know, stay tuned next week. And exit is not the same thing as terminating as ending a war.
And there's a fundamental difference there.
That's why my opinion, this whole business about negotiating power sharing with the Taliban, the strategic dynamics are wrong.
If you're the loser, what incentive does right.
This is a classic strategy. What incentive does the the person who is on top have to actually get and negotiate?
Okay. A few more problems. It's not just that we took our eye off the ball and went to Iraq.
John Paul Vann famously said about Vietnam that we've been fighting for 12 years, one year at a time.
So Groundhog Day syndrome, an attitude that says, don't look back, don't look back.
We got to keep going. We don't care about what happened.
We got to you know, we're faced with this now means that when we did the surge and introduced Big Coin in 2009,
there was no recognition whatsoever that that that the primary reason for the need to introduce
all that stuff were all the errors that we made consecutively and cumulatively since 2001.
At Bonn, where that where the government was structured, we acquiesced in the creation of a hyper centralised state,
essentially making we call in President Karzai, but he's, in effect, a monarch, right?
Exactly. Precisely. Probably the worst form of government, the last structure of government that that a country like Afghanistan needed.
And it looked good at the start. But our attempt to to supplant this hypersexualized system and create a constitutional
electoral democracy had no no basis there was no no substantial number of elite groups,
for example, that were prepared to do anything remotely like that, especially on our short term on the security side.
We never had enough troops in there. And even more importantly, we didn't focus seriously on building the Afghan security forces.
Now, how could you miss something like that? The Taliban were down, they were thrown out.
They'd fled. They'd laid their arms down in 2000, one, 2000, two, 23.
That was the time we were building security forces. Not now.
We help our our counterterrorism focus.
The model that we followed was precisely what created the current generation of warlords.
The very people that we identify as the source of corruption are people that we introduced in the earlier days.
On top of that, we broke trust with our church.
The person that we had, we had joined in choosing as president with Karzai.
We broke trust with him from the very, very start. It's not that he's crazy and idiosyncratic.
I'm amazed his head hasn't exploded with all the contradictions that he's been faced with.
Okay. 26 Fast forward to to to the surge or to the to the recognition that the insurgency had had surge.
And rather than a surge, I mean, really, it was a slow evolution, but the recognition of it really hit home at 26.
It then took several years for the political systems,
the various political systems of of international coalition to gear up to deliver troops in the end to to raise or raise the force level.
That was the right it was probably the right thing to do because I mean, it did lead.
It did lead to getting enough to getting sufficient number of troops on the ground when the situation was critical.
But at the same time, reducing firepower, paying attention to protecting the population, as well as chasing the enemy.
I say some of the fundamental assumptions of coin, though, are pretty much unproven assumptions,
which the top one would be pumping billions more dollars into one of the five poorest countries in the world.
Maybe, maybe not the wisest thing to do. Coin itself, counterinsurgency itself.
It was as if this was some big inspiration. Hang on.
This is all stuff from Vietnam. There's nothing really new in it.
The and the real problem is, is that it was too late.
The. The debate over the surge.
This strategic reassessment was basically in Washington reduced to troop numbers.
Just one factor in then the strategic sufficiency.
But that's what the talk was.
But the worst the worst violation, I think the one that really that really puts it all together is if you take T.E. Lawrence,
the 27 articles, the one that really matters.
Article 15, and we violated that in spades.
So I'm going to read it, but I'm pulling out error of the word Arabs and putting in Afghans.
Do not try to do too much with your own hands. Better.
The Afghans do it tolerably than you do it perfectly.
It is their war and you are to help them not to win it for them.
Actually also under the very odd conditions of Afghanistan.
Your practical work will not be as good as perhaps you think it is.
Proposition number four. Keep it small.
Use your resources wisely. Timing is critical.
I suspect that if you were faced with a situation of doing Bitcoin, it's too late.
The strategic problem, the central strategic problem,
same same as as as Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon faced in Vietnam is how do you achieve strategic
success when you and everybody else knows that your level of effort and the duration are declining?
So you will see everything has to be put in terms of success because you don't want to you don't want to walk away with a defeat.
But that is that is the central challenge. So.
Proposition number five. The side that wins.
In an internal conflict of this nature is the one that more comprehensively captures.
Political legitimacy and authority. By authority, I mean the ability to to lead and be followed or to command and be obeyed.
And by legitimacy, it means that the belief,
the popular belief that that you have the right to do that you have the right to command and the
right to you that those are what what your core strategic goals should should revolve around,
which means that that this stuff, you know, the people as the centre of gravity, winning hearts and minds,
you know, answering grievances, connecting people to the government really are all they're too simplistic.
There's simplistic notions that they're some amorphous, popular,
popular source of of strength out there that that is not ever going to get us through.
All right. Going.
Turning now to southern Afghanistan in the campaign, sort of where how this all gets operationalised.
We're talking there are four regional commanders.
There were. We added we added one here in Helmand when the Marines came in.
But southern Afghanistan is the Pashtun heartland. It consists of Helmand, Oruzgan, Kandahar, Zabul.
Those are the those are the core provinces. That's where the Pashtun population has its origin.
There are also large numbers of eastern Pashtuns that these are the guys that live in the hills over here.
So that's what we're talking about. Mostly this this part of the country, though.
Um. It is, uh, it is desert.
I mean, like the most desolate desert you can imagine and the most desolate, driest mountains you can imagine.
It's got rivers through it. And life is like humanity is like slivers along the rivers.
And by the way, all of these rivers. Don't exit in the sea.
They disappear in the sand. The centre is Kandahar city.
Right there. Kandahar city, named after Alexander Iskander.
Alexander the Great founded the city. It's a crossroads of the Southern Silk Road,
where it meets a northern intersection and finds its way out to the sea, which is now the port of Karachi.
So the supply routes that the coalition relies on are exactly the same as they were thousands, thousands of years ago.
All right. Let me let me do a quick net assessment of what's out there.
Until five to Stryker Brigade arrived in Afghanistan in the summer of 2009.
This area, which was the main the main source of the insurgency,
was held by a single Canadian battle group with associated Australian, Dutch Romanian contingents and then the British in Helmand.
And putting the Canadians into Kandahar was kind of like saying, okay, you guys go do Omaha Beach.
They really I mean, they did a great job.
But but that was, you know, not I don't think a lot of strategic thought went into went into that as 10th Mountain Division.
That was the American division I was with when they were there, took over command in November of 2010.
The surge was at its peak surge had reached its peak. The main effort, Stan, General Stanley McChrystal.
McChrystal, ISAF commander, had designated it as the main effort.
So we had the main call on resources, correct decision.
So the problem the big problem was the bulk of surge forces.
Were Marines, 20,000 out of a total of 30, 34, 35,000.
And even how you count the surge. But 20,000 plus went into this one district, Helmand Province.
We're there with the Brits. And, you know, I don't care how great your coin is there.
It's 3% of the population. But Afghanistan and the main and the main centre was here in Kandahar.
Okay.
Even so, that the effect of the surge, the effect of having that number of troops on the ground was to reverse the tide of the rising insurgency.
No question that that that that happened. All right.
So let's turn to the to the insurgency. What we know we've got a factionalised insurgency generally referred to as the Taliban.
Here it's the Quetta Shura Taliban.
Quetta, because that's where they took refuge in in Pakistan, headed by Mullah Omar, who was the emir during the government.
And their headquarters was in Kandahar City.
He never went to Kabul. It was here. So that's that's why,
from my perspective and the basis of our operational assessment for a political military strategy was that the centre of gravity and the Clausewitz,
in sense the hub of power for the insurgency, was Kandahar.
And if you secured Kandahar and the surrounding districts and our city and the surrounding districts,
then you would render the only faction of the insurgency that represents national aspirations.
You would render that futile. And that's your key to dismantling the Taliban.
Not running around in the hills, banging away at every little tribe in every little valley.
You're never, ever, ever going to get there. You have to approach it here first and then move out from there.
And that was the the basic idea. The Taliban have something that I believe is essential.
Proposition number six. You've got to have a compelling strategic narrative.
This is from Emile Simpson's book, War and War from the Ground Up.
If you haven't seen it, it's really terrific. So strategic narrative, it's a stable, unifying vision that sustains your cause.
It's all it is. It's not information operations. It's not lines of effort.
It's not all this other coin stuff. It's it's it's the vision that you have for the Taliban.
It's jihad. It's a religious war.
And Jihadis are expressive lawyers, jihadist forever.
So there is a cause around which they will fight.
That is, rule is not entirely independent, but it doesn't depend on the desire to seize power and the state of the state.
It's more than a it's more than just a desire to seize power for the state.
Okay. So turning to how we went about it. The.
We put together a small team in the in the initiative group that reported directly to the to the Division Commander and Regional Command South.
We brought in a few people. For example, Tom Barfield came for a couple of weeks and and he's I mean, he's great political thinker, very entertaining.
And he, you know, you talk to the to the command group and that sort of thing.
We we wrote basically an integrated political military plan.
So we had a campaign plan, had a military component and an integrated political component, never been done before.
So people didn't quite know how to deal with the animal. But since we had the the commander on board, it was it went very smoothly.
The on the military side. Used combat power to to secure Kandahar City and the surrounding districts.
And we found in the process that it takes about two years to complete that clear, hold, build cycle to really stabilise it.
That job was never finished. The surge was over before that draft was finished.
We synchronised with special operations forces.
I think that was a major advance. So instead of having special operations, doing targeted kill capture against against leaders,
independent from what your main what your main groups were doing,
which would mean that you'd have operations taking out leaders, but you didn't have anybody securing an area.
And since the replacement time averaged about six weeks by the time you got there,
if you hadn't synchronised boom Taliban drop in like that, no problem.
So synchronising those was very important. Put gave Afghanistan security force partnering top priority.
In other words, rather than handing it off to the National Guard and having things like majors mentor general officers.
That really is the model. HOFFMAN The seniors mentored the seniors.
That was the number one part.
And then it flowed down from there rather than working to the bottom up and and gave equal attention to the police and integrated
rather than just using them as paramilitary auxiliaries and then letting them run their corrupt mafia operations on the side,
integrated them so that the army would operate, the Afghan army would operate jointly forward,
and then the police would be responsible for securing areas that were specially designated designated for them.
So proposition number seven. Force levels and force employment are equally important.
Got to pay attention to both of those as you put together. All right.
Political side. I'm not talking here about if you if you've been you know, if you follow the news on Afghanistan, about governance,
rule of law, about creating, you know, a government bureaucracy that deals that deliver services.
About elections. About about anti-corruption.
Any of that stuff. What we did was we took advantage of a formal decision that that General McChrystal made in 2010 to stop chasing Ahmed Wali Karzai,
the president's brother, who was the the godfather.
I thought of him as the kingpin of Kandahar. He really was the second most powerful person in the country who had everything in his hands.
The fact that he was also a criminal genius who who, you know, deeply involved in the family business.
Remember, the number one cash crop here is opium.
Having only the CIA and the Special Forces deal with him to help hire militias and rent property was involving the person who
was literally the kingpin of the whole of the centre of gravity of the country in about that much sliver of what mattered.
So instead of instead of going in and delivering red lines and trying to dictate to the president's brother what he could and could not do,
I mean, what do you think we are trying to do there?
We started talking to him and to a whole series of people throughout these these four primarily in these four provinces.
And we listened to them. They were extremely sophisticated.
And they understood what needed to be. They understood what needed to be done.
The core of it was a four day session that that the small team of ours held with a group of leaders in the governor's palace in Kandahar.
And we literally sat there and wrote this document called Peace in Southern Afghanistan, was based around the concept of LOI Kandahar.
LOI Kandahar became the strategic narrative.
What it means is greater Kandahar, and it's instantly recognisable to any Afghan, not not just Pashtun,
but any Afghan understands it predates the foundation of the nation state in 1747.
This is the southern Pashtun heartland. And when Afghanistan was founded as a nation state by Ahmed Shah Durrani in 1747,
it was based originally out of Kandahar and moved to Kabul because it was a better location geographically
to unify the country and to get out of the intrigues in the southern portion intrigues of Kandahar.
So. The other the other Karzai brother, Khartoum Karzai, he's sort of the elder family counsellor type, said.
What we have to do is use LOI Kandahar to go back in order to go forward.
So that was the operating principle. In other words, go back to that period pre 1978 when Afghanistan enjoyed 50 years of stability.
And look to what what was working then in order to move to move forward and and the rats through that.
So with Lloyd Kandahar is the rallying cry we move to unify formal and informal leaders from from these four provinces held in Kandahar,
Zabul, Uruzgan, with sort of fringe representatives and gods near and far where there are also Pashtuns.
Around the themes of unifying, connecting to Kabul rather than just Kabul, sitting up here super,
hyper centralised and top down, creating a basis, a basis for political action.
It was sort of in a way it was based on an aristocracy, southern power, Pashtun aristocracy.
Yes, it was archaic, but it was authentic.
It was Afghan. The purpose was to establish the basis for the legitimacy and authority of the Afghan state.
That thing that is that central is the central problem of the state in Kabul is it's
not it does not perceive as having sufficient authority or legitimacy and in large
part because they're dependent on the coalition to create that situation that Barfield
described of empirical evidence on the ground based on our security activities,
that would convince that that that made it convincing that the Taliban recapturing Kandahar in the emirate was futile.
That would lead to a political calculation that the state is going to be the winner is the definitive winner to unify leaders around that vision.
To include tribes and clans that have been disaffected and to bring the the traditional charismatic leaders into the
formal system by giving them positions in the security forces and thereby subjecting them to professionalisation.
That was the basic program also had a Taliban outreach program that was the Afghan it was the Afghans that came up with this.
They're talking to the Taliban anyway. The big problem is this this hang up with national power sharing negotiations up here is a total distraction.
The Tajiks, the Hazaras, the Uzbeks, they hate the idea of bringing the Taliban into the government.
But the idea that they can resettle in their home areas replaces their from the problem.
They can hang out and do whatever they want down here. The big issue was how do you get them out of Pakistan where whether the Pakistani
intelligence service knows where all their families are and can secure their families.
So it was sort of a challenge to get to get the families out first and then and then make it happen.
Okay. Just to just to wind up here. Proposition number eight.
Political and military action must be integrated.
I think I've given a little bit of a description,
and the way that they're integrated is that military action is in support of your political aims at all times.
Again, back to basic your basic Clausewitz. The problem is that we've reversed that pretty much the whole the whole time through.
And just to close off this, the LOI Kandahar came to a head after the assassination of the principal warlord in Oruzgan province here in the north,
very mountainous province that we had alienated.
By the way, although he was the man that made it possible for Karzai to survive again and to have a base of power.
In 2001, he was blown up in Kabul by the move.
I mean, suicide bombing is bad enough but turban bomber that just chilling that.
So at his memorial ceremony we we ISAF in its appropriate role of providing support to Afghan initiative provided helicopters
that flew a dozen rapid the governor plus a dozen tribal leaders from all the provinces to Tarin Kowt the capital of Oruzgan.
And the buzz had been building up for this for a long time.
The Afghans insisted that they would secure this, even though they knew there would be a huge target.
It ended up that thousands of people turned out turned out for this event.
And, you know, one after another Afghan got up and talked the Afghans totally.
There's no time schedule. There's no agenda. You know, they get up and talk and it's dramatic and it's emotional like only Afghans can be.
And this mullah, who none of us had ever heard of, but all of them knew when he stood in the stages.
But you could just hear this buzz went all through the crowd and he got up and he he gave this talk and sort of,
you know, we got to hang together or we're all going to hang separately because the Taliban is killing us.
Just galvanised them into action. A delegation followed that immediately to President Karzai.
Came came the older brother had already gone secretly to talk to him and gotten his blessing for this.
A delegation went to him and said, Stop calling the Taliban, your brothers.
They're the ones who are killing us. And he stopped.
We then started to lobby in in Kabul to get support because that was really the key, was to get to get the dynamic working.
And here's where the story gets sad. It all pretty much collapsed.
The 10th Mountain Division rotated out. 82nd Airborne came in.
Bottom line, 82nd Airborne, they did not get it.
They said, yep, yep, we know what we're doing. See you later by. And boom, they marched in the wrong direction.
The ISAF was not prepared. They had you know, I would have to say, frankly,
General Petraeus had already been convinced by advisers around him that they had to shift the
main after it out of the south and hurry up and chase the soccer ball of violence to the east.
And although the idea of why Kandahar is still out there, never beyond that point, it did not go.
And I think that kind of ends with the story of our experience in Afghanistan.